Derner's Own Internship Consortium

By Michael Kestenbaum, Jonathan Jackson, Ph.D., and Jairo Fuertes, Ph.D.

This fall, four Derner students will begin their internships at various sites participating in the newly developed Derner Internship Consortium. We sat with Dr. Jackson to hear what led him to successfully implement the internship program for doctoral clinical psychology students.

During our discussion, Dr. Jackson elaborated on the many factors that contributed to the foundation of the Derner Internship Consortium. In particular, he spoke of the overarching problem with the matching process. “I’ve been overseeing the internship process for fourth year students for several years,” Dr. Jackson said. “And ever since I took it over, there’s been an imbalance, a national imbalance. There are more students applying for accredited spots than there are accredited spots. And every year…there would be a small number, sometimes none, but more typically a small number of students, who would not match.” This occurred despite the fact that the students not matching were strong academically and had had sufficient training to make them competitive for the match. Understandably, for some of these students, it was a major blow to their confidence, not to mention to their overall professional and personal plans. “It really affected the entire class, the morale of the whole class,” Dr. Jackson explained.

Dr. Jackson eventually learned about a potential solution to this problem in the form of an affiliated internship that a doctoral program could create. Although such a program could function exclusively for students of the particular doctoral program or could consider applicants from other programs, Dr. Jackson set out, at first, to operate the Internship Program for Derner students only. Basing his ideas on how other programs operated similar internships, Dr. Jackson saw an opportunity for such an internship to assist current students in obtaining high-quality internship experiences and to add to the distinction of the PhD program at Derner. According to Dr. Jackson “there was nothing stopping anybody with the resources and the will to create an internship” for a doctoral program. As Dr. Jackson said, “The wheel had been invented.” But how to copy the design of said wheel while also adjusting the designs for your particular needs? This is the question that Dr. Jackson slowly answered as he set out to build the Internship Program from scratch.

Two years ago, there was consensus among the administration and faculty that an in-house internship would enable current students to worry less about the 5th year while focusing more on the earlier training years, and that it might enhance the value of the program to prospective students. Dr. Jackson and the Derner administration viewed the internship as a unique addition to the doctoral program, as most other APA-approved PhD clinical psychology programs do not offer their own internships. However, though much more was needed to make it a reality, the all-important factor of will was present. “Since I proposed the internship,” Dr. Jackson stated, “the role of moving ahead and bringing it to reality was also mine.”

Early on, Dr. Jackson and other members of the Derner faculty met and spoke with individuals from different universities who had experience building internships within clinical psychology doctoral programs. In large part due to the consultation received from his colleagues at other universities, Dr. Jackson understood that he first needed partners, potential sites to join the Internship Consortium. As such, he approached several locations and pitched the idea. These particular locations were sites where Derner had a history of placing externs, where Dr. Jackson had established relationships with the supervisors and training directors, and where said trainers might be receptive to the idea of participating in an internship. Where he received positive responses, Dr. Jackson followed up with these locations by discussing with them the details of the internship.

The locations that agreed to participate in the Internship Consortium are: the Student Counseling Center at Adelphi University, the Village Institute for Psychotherapy in Manhattan, the William Alanson White Institute in Manhattan, and the Employee Assistance Program in the Corporate Office of North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital. Each location has had experience with Derner students working there in some capacity. Just as important, each site, in particular the White Institute, was interested in affiliating with Derner’s Internship Consortium because of their ambitions to keep doctoral training relevant and to encourage more analytic ways of working with patients. ” I did anticipate a receptiveness on the other end,” Dr Jackson exclaimed, “and that was very much the case.”

Three of the participating sites agreed to take two part-time interns, which equates to three full-time interns among the three locations. Additionally, the Employee Assistance Program accepted a trainee who had previously trained there as an extern. Placement at the sites will be half-time. As such, interns will accrue a total of 2,000 hours by the end of their respective training years. Each site will require that interns treat patients in a variety of modalities: individual, group, couple, etc. Individual supervision by a licensed clinical psychologist, group supervision, case conferences, and didactic training will also be offered at every site. In addition, interns will attend weekly didactic/case conference meetings at Derner throughout the year, taught by Derner faculty in their respective areas of expertise, including, for example, trauma, short-term therapy, group therapy, diversity, etc.